Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Jolla invites users to Early Access Sailfish OS releases

This is almost NEWS - And in my opinion, nice news indeed. Jolla is looking for even deeper contact with their community, hoping to get some final feedback of their system updates in advance to the public release.

Jolla invites users to Early Access Sailfish OS releases

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February 3, 2015: There's a new option in your Jolla account. There's a new checkbox below your personal information, for joining the Early Access Update Program. If you check the box, save and exit, this means:

You will get a notification of Sailfish OS system updates about a week earlier than normal users, including all the new features and bug fixes to be published in the next Sailfish OS release

You're expected to give feedback of this early version of the next Saifish OS update for the developers at Jolla HQ, so that they can polish the final release for public.

The early release version is to be considered as stable, meaning that all the new issues found between the early release and the final release are either fixed, or added as information to the official release notes.

Your Jolla will have its normal warranty. You need to apply (with the checkbox) only once, and you'll be part of the program as long as the box is checked. You can, whenever you want, get out of this program by simply unchecking the box.

PLEASE NOTE:

These early access versions are not quite finalized. You might run into issues requiring backup restore, some tweaking, or even factory resets. So if you join this program, prepare to have some basic knowledge of backing up the phone, using factory reset, and even better, some experience with the Terminal app or SSH connection.

Also, being "privileged" to study the new features in advance is something given to you for free - please contribute back to the developers by reporting any new issues you might run into.

UPDATE: And how do we report the new issues found?

For now: As you would do with a regular release. We're usually monitoring together, IRC, mailing list and social media channels after releases for issues, and will continue doing so.

Additionally we'll select larger groups from the people who decided to opt-in for experiments related to feedback gathering -- at first via separate groups on together. We have some ideas how feedback gathering at that scale _might_ work, but we need to try it. Eric will take care of organizing that, and announce related topics on together.